I've been reading up on InDesign and QuarkXPress lately.  Do any of the designers here use either of those, and could you relate your experiences in terms of flexibility and simplicity of use?  

Alternately, if you use another program for your print/pdf layout, what's your experience been, and why have you gone with that choice?

Quote from: Zachary The First;270656I've been reading up on InDesign and QuarkXPress lately.  Do any of the designers here use either of those, and could you relate your experiences in terms of flexibility and simplicity of use?  

Alternately, if you use another program for your print/pdf layout, what's your experience been, and why have you gone with that choice?

Bill and I both use Adobe FrameMaker - he's very good at it, which accounts for the difference. The reason? It's designed to lay out books like textbooks and such as opposed to primarily brochures and magazines. The tools are phenomenally good - typical Adobe product: immense power once you get past the patented Adobe "Learning Cliff." It handles immense projects with ease and grace.

-clash

I use both at my day job. IMO In Design is the better product for the layman, particularly if you avoid flashy layout. There is a learning curve, but it's not too steep.

We use Quark Xpress at work, but I cut my teeth on InDesign in college.

If I had my druthers, I'd work with InDesign. Mostly because I'm very familiar with PhotoShop and other Adobe products. I have one of the creative suites (second version, I think) on my home PC.

One thing that I absolutely prefer in InDesign over Xpress, is the main tool in InDesign can be used to select boxes and items. The tool is split in Xpress and the two selectors have to be switched to use one over the other. I find this annoying, especially since I do a lot of deadline work and use a lot of art (newspaper design), so I'd rather have as few steps as possible in the process.

We use Xpress 6.5, so this might have been addressed with a keystroke similar to InDesign, in later versions of the program.

There are some other differences that are mostly just preference. How boxes are used, how templates are built/used, etc.

You might want to try to get your hands on a demo for each and play around with them until you decide which you prefer.

But for my money, I feel I can do more and get closer to my original vision when using InDesign (when I layout personal projects). I've made a résumé, a number of DVD box covers, brochures, newspaper pages, magazines and RPG style books in InDesign. It can do a lot and it can do it well. To be fair, I've only ever really design newspaper pages in Xpress. So, my opinion is likely skewed.

Hope this helps.

I use OpenOffice because I am,

• cheap-arsed
• retarded

I've used both, basically since the initial versions of each. [And both Aldus PageMaker and the Adobe versions thereof]. InDesign is simpler, in my opinion, than Quark, mostly because it follows more of the basic Windows interface guidelines, and where it deviates from them, it follows Adobe's own. As they intended, if you can learn one Adobe program, you're halfway to learning them all. And there's reasonable integration back and forth between them, although never as good as I'd like it to be.

Quark is fine, and for many tasks, even better than InDesign. But overall, InDesign gets my vote, hands-down...if you have to choose between the two. My preferred graphic design and page layout program is definitely PageMaker 6.5; there are programs that do full-featured page layout better, but PageMaker 6.5 does everything I need it to do, and doesn't have too much ludicrous bloat. For what I usually use it for, I could probably get away with using Aldus PageMaker 4.2. [You can't go back any further, because you lose text rotation.]

Zach - I can ask for a breakdown from the experts here; it's what they do all day long (not me, though). The company with whom I am currently employed does pre-press and so forth for everything from text books to direct mail to automotive part catalogs...

If you want, I can ask my friend who knows this stuff far better than me if he'd be willing to talk...

Quote from: Zachary The First;270656I've been reading up on InDesign and QuarkXPress lately.  Do any of the designers here use either of those, and could you relate your experiences in terms of flexibility and simplicity of use?  

Alternately, if you use another program for your print/pdf layout, what's your experience been, and why have you gone with that choice?

I have written programming around quark and I would not say it is easy. I am not that experienced with InDesign but I would recommend many Adobe products before Quark.

As to what I use, Adobe Framemaker 7.1. I cannot express the high level of "pointed right at RPG style layout" this program is. Everything from serious referencing, cross referencing, table layout, book management to HTML output. That said, as Clash mentioned, I think he and I are the only ones using it in the industry.

Bill

Quote from: HinterWelt;270711I have written programming around quark and I would not say it is easy. I am not that experienced with InDesign but I would recommend many Adobe products before Quark.

As to what I use, Adobe Framemaker 7.1. I cannot express the high level of "pointed right at RPG style layout" this program is. Everything from serious referencing, cross referencing, table layout, book management to HTML output. That said, as Clash mentioned, I think he and I are the only ones using it in the industry.

Bill

And why you will never see a "Page XX" error in either of our games. That just doesn't happen. The program is built around linking and referencing. Now pretty is another thing. Bill can do pretty as well as functional, so it's not the program.

-clash

I've been using Serif Software's Page Plus.  It's a clone of Indesign that is very simple to use, once you get some practice with it.  You can DOWNLOAD a free version to try out.  It doesn't allow PDF creation, but you can upgrade to Page Plus Version 9 for only $9.95, and if you like that you can upgrade to the latest version for about $50 USD.

Quote from: James J Skach;270696Zach - I can ask for a breakdown from the experts here; it's what they do all day long (not me, though). The company with whom I am currently employed does pre-press and so forth for everything from text books to direct mail to automotive part catalogs...

Then I'm going to bet they use Quark. Poor bastards.

Quote from: flyingmice;270718And why you will never see a "Page XX" error in either of our games. That just doesn't happen. The program is built around linking and referencing.

And it's pretty brilliant at it. Dynamic indexing and TOC generation make RPG design so much simpler. It seems to me Quark has some of these features now, but as I say, I'm a PageMaker whore, so I'm not up on the latest Quark.

Quote from: Jamfke;270721I've been using Serif Software's Page Plus.  It's a clone of Indesign that is very simple to use, once you get some practice with it.  You can DOWNLOAD a free version to try out.  It doesn't allow PDF creation, but you can upgrade to Page Plus Version 9 for only $9.95, and if you like that you can upgrade to the latest version for about $50 USD.

I have it, and I have to say that for anything near the price there's nothing even close.

-clash

Quote from: Engine;270722And it's pretty brilliant at it. Dynamic indexing and TOC generation make RPG design so much simpler. It seems to me Quark has some of these features now, but as I say, I'm a PageMaker whore, so I'm not up on the latest Quark.

Exactly. There's a reason why Adobe maintains two completely separate layout systems.

-clash

Well, here's the abbreviated version...

We do still use Quark for a series of legacy reasons (some customers still request it, we have X number of licenses purchased, etc.). However, whenever we can, we move things to InDesign. When customers ask for our opinion, we suggest InDesign. My source informs me that, in his opinion, it's superior in pretty much every way.

Then he said "where they both pretty much fall down is on extensive technical documentation - then most people use FrameMaker." So I told him about our resident freaks..I mean, uh, publishers...that use that very product. I pondered that it could be seen as saying RPG's are like long technical documents. He did say it was good for the very reasons mentioned here (indexing, cross referencing, etc.) so he backs you two weirdos...umm..publishers...on that. I asked if that would make it good for the textbook work - but he said that text books are very different and even the college ones are far less like technical manuals these days.

If requested, I could probe for more details on exactly what makes it so superior, but he did mention ease of use, capability, integration with other Adobe products, etc.

Don't know if that helps..

Quote from: James J Skach;270737Well, here's the abbreviated version...

We do still use Quark for a series of legacy reasons (some customers still request it, we have X number of licenses purchased, etc.). However, whenever we can, we move things to InDesign. When customers ask for our opinion, we suggest InDesign. My source informs me that, in his opinion, it's superior in pretty much every way.

Then he said "where they both pretty much fall down is on extensive technical documentation - then most people use FrameMaker." So I told him about our resident freaks..I mean, uh, publishers...that use that very product. I pondered that it could be seen as saying RPG's are like long technical documents. He did say it was good for the very reasons mentioned here (indexing, cross referencing, etc.) so he backs you two weirdos...umm..publishers...on that. I asked if that would make it good for the textbook work - but he said that text books are very different and even the college ones are far less like technical manuals these days.

If requested, I could probe for more details on exactly what makes it so superior, but he did mention ease of use, capability, integration with other Adobe products, etc.

Don't know if that helps..

In real life I'm a professional tech writer. I see RPGs as exactly the same thing - extensive technical documentation.

-clash